2016 is the year of the baby. Nick and I are officially scheduled for IVF with ICSI in March. After three long years of pre-baby purgatory, this party is finally getting started.

(If you don't know what IVF and ICSI are, let me know because I love talking about this. Or google it! Bodies are weird and I'm sure you're going to learn something that you either didn't learn in sex ed or you completely forgot. Did you know sometimes they have you take birth control before you start fertility treatments? This shit is crazy.)

We are incredibly lucky and...fine, I'll say it, blessed to be able to do this. Three years ago, when Baby Quest started, we wouldn't have been able to afford this. Any insurance coverage for this stuff is extremely rare and we definitely weren't earning enough to pay for it until now.

Nick's work switched insurance recently to add coverage for fertility treatments. To have a company that's willing to make this change for its employees is amazing. To have this change happen right when we need it is insane. To have this cover almost the entire amount of our treatments is fantastic. I can't say enough about how perfectly everything lined up and how incredibly thankful I am.

He asked me for photos of us for his work desk. It took me until I quit my job and took down my desk things for him to finally get the photos. The photos from my old desk.

I took them out of my box of work things (it's been two months and it's still packed in the garage next to the car where I left it ever since my last day at work, when I tossed it out of the car after we stopped at home to take the dog out before heading out for a celebratory FREE FROM STRESSFUL JORB dinner) and I placed them in Nick's work bag. I made sure to tell him they were there.

Flash forward to two months later when I asked Nick if he'd taken them out of his bag and placed them at his desk. He hadn't of course. They weren't in the pocket he normally checked, where his laptop lies (because I didn't want them to get folded and crunched obviously), so they never moved.

I waited a few days and asked him again.

Nope.

Still in the bag.

Finally one night it was too much and it caused a fight. I made a big stink of his not removing the pictures from his bag. He didn't want his wife at his desk! She was already around too much! My very pictorial presence might stop him from making moves on the other women (he has a total of two women at his office). It didn't help that he had lost his wedding ring about a month prior (a story for another time...for now just know that I WAS RIGHT and I TOLD HIM SO) and therefore his hand shouted SINGLE AVAILABLE I'M SINGLE, LADIEZZZZ every time he typed or moved or breathed. Which of course happened often at work.

But I wasn't upset about the pictures. Well I was but that wasn't the real reason. I let him stew confused in bed for a few minutes before I admitted to him the actual reason I was upset:

I planned on sneaking a surprise note or something into his bag when I finally found out I was pregnant. His ignorance and single-minded focus on just one pocket ruined all of my plans. He would never notice the surprise if he only checked one pocket! I knew it was silly and we laughed and kissed and he told me which pocket to put it in (the one with his laptop. duh) and we rolled over to go to sleep.

Well Nick went to sleep. I stayed awake for hours thinking about the actualreason I was upset. The reason I couldn't admit to Nick but the reason that continued to keep me awake (weeks after the original conversation) until 3 or 4 am because if I just keep reading book after book after book then my brain wouldn't have time to think about the fact that I would never be able to surprise Nick with a pregnancy.

I would never wonder if maybe my period was due sometime soon and it would never turn out that it was due the day before yesterday and I would never take a pregnancy test on a whim and I would never be pleasantly yet nervously surprised to discover that it was positive. I would never grab the crocheted yellow baby booties that my mother-in-law bought for me five and a half years ago, the baby booties I hide in the back corner of the bathroom cabinet under the sink. I would never be able to take these baby booties and sneak them into Nick's laptop bag with a cute note. I would never sneak back into bed and pretend to fall back asleep before Nick was ready to leave for work and he found my little surprise. He would never come bounding up the stairs calling for me. He would never come running into the bedroom and scoop me up, laughing and smiling and talking to me about what this meant and how excited we both were, ending up missing his carpool ride into work. He wouldn't take a half day so we could grab breakfast and calculate when the baby was due.

None of this would ever happen because we would never have the “surprise” pregnancy or the test. I had been tracking my period obsessively for almost three years. I had an app on my phone where I tracked our intercourse, charted my temperature, predicted my ovulation, and observed my cervical mucus. We had been officially “trying” for over two years. We had started with a few appointments at a fertility clinic and IUI or IVF was in our future. Nick's test results didn't look too great. My results were low for my age. Even if we did end up able to have children together, they'd be so pre-planned, observed when they were only follicles, charted as they grew into embryos, we'd even know the exact time of conception, that there would be no surprise.